A configuration management database (CMDB) provides a mechanism for specifying and storing system configuration “artifacts” (i.e., computer hardware and/or software processing resources) and “dependencies” (i.e., the data and/or parameters used in defining the relationships) among those artifacts for accomplishing a given set of processing task(s). The “artifacts” include a specification of the hardware and software components (identifying computer processors, memory, peripherals, clients/servers, routers, application and/or operating system software, databases and transaction tiers, etc.) which make up the necessary system processing infrastructure, while “dependency” information includes configuration data defining the physical and/or functional and/or informational relationships between these processing resources used for meeting business or other production goals (for example, this information can be populated in a CMDB using program tools such as Collation Confignia).
Known techniques for system capacity planning involve estimating the expected workload (in terms of extent and rate of data input and/or output) while also accounting for any limitations and resource requirements of the software (and of the physical processing and/or memory components) used for a given application in order to determine the necessary resources to allocate in meeting production requirements, such as planning the server capacity needed to accommodate the peak and normal loads of a data processing task. One of the drawbacks of traditional capacity planning is that these estimates are made in the “laboratory” when designing a system for operation but do not account for aspects of the actual production environment, whereas the invention enables capacity planning to be more accurately performed by leveraging information available about the processing environment that exists when the system is put into operation.